If you’re not spending the majority of your time rewriting your screenplay, you’re making a huge mistake. Back when Chelsea and I first started screenwriting, rewrites were quick and easy. We thought to ourselves “Our concept is good,” (it wasn’t) “Our characters are great,” (they weren’t) and “Our story works” (it didn’t).

We were afraid to look at our writing critically and our work suffered. To put this in perspective, before Chelsea and I really learned to rewrite, our scripts didn’t get any attention.Now that we've changed our rewriting process, we’ve been hired to write two feature films. One of them is just a few weeks away from filming.The ball would have been rolling a lot sooner if we had focused more of our time and energy on the rewrite process.

Pretty stupid, right? Fast forward to today. I see people making the same mistakes we made. They’re embarking on ineffective rewrites, not making any real progress on their scripts. In this article I’ll share the three essential components to every rewrite, along with one big rewriting tip that could change the way you write forever...

Get Notes

This might sound obvious to some, but too many screenwriters start rewriting before they get feedback on their script. I know because Chelsea and I worked like this for a considerable amount of time. We’d finish a draft, put it down for a week, and then jump right back in.

Today, we can't believe that this was our process. But plenty of screenwriters work like this, and few of them write successful scripts. Learn from our mistakes. You need to get a second, third and fourth opinion before you take a new pass at your script.

Only then can you begin an effective rewrite. But not before you...

Separate the Good From the Bad

Good rewriting starts with your ability to accept or reject the notes that you’re going to incorporate into your work. When you’re just starting out, it can be hard to tell the good from the bad. But that doesn’t mean you should use every note you get. When in doubt, trust yourself. Your readers are not in your head. They are bringing their own taste and opinions and perspective to your work. It is a very real possibility that they are simply not seeing the same movie you are.For example: If you see a moment as quietly funny and they see it as big and broad, they're watching a movie that's entirely different than the one you wrote.

To a certain extent you can use your writing to control what movie your readers see in their minds.

But if your script is being read by people with bad (or even different) taste, their notes will be less constructive than they first appear.

Disclaimer: If you're just starting out as a screenwriter, you're not going to be able to tell the good notes from the bad quite yet. You're still refining your taste, so you'll incorporate bad notes more often than you'd like. That's okay.

Screenwriting is about experimenting. But always remember to trust yourself first. When we were just starting out, Chelsea and I embarked on huge rewrites based on notes that didn't really resonate with us. Our drafts got worse and worse until we found the confidence to reject ideas that didn't work for us.

The more you write, the more confident you become with your voice, the better you'll become at rejecting bad notes and taking good ones.

Ultimately, you should feel comfortable rejecting 90% of the notes you get. And a watered down vision will ruin your script.

Seriously Consider Starting Again

Think of the notes process like panning for gold. You’ve sifted through tons of garbage to finally find what matters. Now you need to respect those notes. Really dive deep into them. If you’re honest with yourself, you will often find that these few notes are symptoms of large, ubiquitous problems. It’s hard to hear, but more often than not, you’d be better off just starting again. This isn’t a widely held opinion, and it certainly isn’t universally applicable, but it’s something Chelsea and I apply to our own writing with almost every script we write.

Look at it this way...Rewriting the traditional way, without starting from page one, is like taking a road trip from NY to Hollywood with terrible directions.

You may end up at your destination, but you'll waste a lot of gas on pointless detours along the way.

When you’re driving back to the East Coast, would you stick with the directions you followed the first time, making sporadic changes one at a time? Not if you could take a direct route, you wouldn’t. And that’s why we go back to page one.

Second drafts often call for big revisions. When you try to weave these changes into a pre-existing draft, you’re creating a patch work that readers will be able to spot a mile away.

But when you start from scratch, you can draw a whole new outline. You can correct the big problems from your previous draft before you even start to write.

Here are the three big reasons this approach works so well for us:

It's Faster: The second draft goes much faster than the first one. You've already had a practice run, after all.

It's More Organized: Keeping track of all the small details in a rewrite gives me a headache.

It's More Creative: There's nothing as liberating as re-thinking every single aspect of your script. Going back to square one will enable you to see more clearly, and it will give you new, better ideas for your next draft.

Don’t hold back. When you begin your rewrite, everything should go on the chopping block. Concept. Characters. Structure. Even genre and medium could change.

But you’ll never know if you don’t consider the page one rewrite. Often a ‘worst case scenario’ for writers, it’s actually the secret little pill that could save your ailing script.

Comment Below

Have you been toiling over a rewrite to no avail? Is this technique a crazy waste of time? What did you think of that Iron Man 3 trailer? Comment below.

They say that if DH Lawrence found a problem anywhere in his manuscripts he would go and rewrite the entire novel again. When I learned this in my English Lit. class I remember thinking "what a glutton for punishment", when I started writing screenplays I thought "what a genius". You're right, nothing liberates you like starting from scratch again because you're memory is a great filter- it remembers the good bits and tends to ditch the bad.

Very good article. I used to be afraid of the page one re-write, because of the fear of all that work and time. It made me cringe to think I wasted all the time I spent on the countless drafts I already spent on the script. Re-write the whole thing again? Are you kidding me?! But then--after feedback--I realized that the idea was there but the execution was not. So instead of placing another "band aid" on a broken script, I put my script through an intensive triple-bypass surgery. :)

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Daphne

1/17/2013 02:16:27 am

Being a perfectionist, it forces me to go back to certain scenes and rewrite because I can feel they don't work for some reason. I actually really love rewriting and editing, it does feel better in my head, those changes. Every rewrite feels better (therefore, the writing itself gets better, I believe). I feel safe enough to say that rewrites and forced changes don't scare me like they used to be.

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Rob F.

5/15/2013 09:07:30 am

Great article. Currently writing a spec sitcom script. This helps put things into a much different perspective.

Glad the article helped, Rob. Hope your spec goes well! Feel free to email anytime if you have any questions as you proceed.

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Danny A.

2/6/2014 04:04:04 am

Interesting..I have written a few screenplays that need rewrites. I was rewriting one by keeping some scenes, planning to rewrite others, all the while keeping track of where the changes go, where I continue from the original..no wonder I had trouble getting motivated. The whole process would probably end up taking more time than a total do-over..Thanks for the great article.

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James Michael Mulligan

3/20/2014 04:36:24 am

Funny. I was just about to take this approach with a script I shelved about a year ago. It was fairly well received in a contest and was subsequently covered a few times as a result. The notes, which were helpful, spot on, and dead wrong all at once, took a while to assimilate. By taking a pause to calculate my strategy, I now feel fresh and excited to start a page one rewrite, confident in the knowledge that it's going to be so much better than it was.

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Dan S

3/25/2018 09:15:45 am

Great article! Great points!

I am at the rewrite stage on one screenplay, and finishing the outlines for two more.

Your point about looking at your work critically is so very true. It can make a big difference.

I have found that you have to look at each aspect of your script, separately, i.e. dialogue, structure, entertainment value, scene transitions, action first, dialogue second etc.